September 23, 2006

Adam McEwen's Incendiary Art

The ability to deal out
inhumanity with equanimity is at the core of British-born artist Adam
McEwen's second solo show,"8 for 8:30," at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery. A
timely meditation on the cold rationality of the military-industrial
complex, Mr. McEwen's shrewdly political show asks more questions than
it tries to answer.

Yet by looking at the horror of the Allied bombings of Nazi Germany,
and the post-war American boom that was its euphoric aftermath, the
show makes the case that the link between profit and obliteration
applies today more than ever. First raze, then rebuild, and as Kurt
Vonnegut likes to say, so it goes.

The show is divided into two seemingly disparate parts: a series of
monochrome paintings spackled with wads of chewed gum, and several
C-print photographs of New York's notorious Lefrak City housing complex.

Each of Mr. McEwen's large-scale paintings is named after German
cities decimated by incendiary bombs (Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, etc.).
Pieces of flat dried gum glued to the canvas — think of the typical New
York sidewalk — offer a bird's eye view of each blank ‘cityscape', from
the objective distance with which military might is wielded.

In "Dresden," for example, different colored wads sit on a field of
deep black, beacons suspended in a sea of darkness. The visual analogy
becomes immediate through Mr. McEwen's appropriation of a vintage
photograph showing the firestorms enveloping the city from above.

This isn't simply gallows humor. The paintings have an unsettling
source, as Mr. McEwen's compositions loosely follow the RAF's own
calculations of how many Germans could be killed by each ton of bombs
dropped (the answer was .2).The chewed gum makes the absurdity of this
quantitative destruction visceral: lots of wads for high-saturated
areas of death, sparse monochromatic fields for minimal damage.

In asking how annihilation can be quantified, Mr. McEwen asks an
important question for artists in our fervent political era: How can
the horror of war be represented? Answering that question is, in
effect, to take a stand on what constitutes political art. {read on...}

Comments

The ability to deal out
inhumanity with equanimity is at the core of British-born artist Adam
McEwen's second solo show,"8 for 8:30," at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery. A
timely meditation on the cold rationality of the military-industrial
complex, Mr. McEwen's shrewdly political show asks more questions than
it tries to answer.

Yet by looking at the horror of the Allied bombings of Nazi Germany,
and the post-war American boom that was its euphoric aftermath, the
show makes the case that the link between profit and obliteration
applies today more than ever. First raze, then rebuild, and as Kurt
Vonnegut likes to say, so it goes.

The show is divided into two seemingly disparate parts: a series of
monochrome paintings spackled with wads of chewed gum, and several
C-print photographs of New York's notorious Lefrak City housing complex.

Each of Mr. McEwen's large-scale paintings is named after German
cities decimated by incendiary bombs (Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, etc.).
Pieces of flat dried gum glued to the canvas — think of the typical New
York sidewalk — offer a bird's eye view of each blank ‘cityscape', from
the objective distance with which military might is wielded.

In "Dresden," for example, different colored wads sit on a field of
deep black, beacons suspended in a sea of darkness. The visual analogy
becomes immediate through Mr. McEwen's appropriation of a vintage
photograph showing the firestorms enveloping the city from above.

This isn't simply gallows humor. The paintings have an unsettling
source, as Mr. McEwen's compositions loosely follow the RAF's own
calculations of how many Germans could be killed by each ton of bombs
dropped (the answer was .2).The chewed gum makes the absurdity of this
quantitative destruction visceral: lots of wads for high-saturated
areas of death, sparse monochromatic fields for minimal damage.

In asking how annihilation can be quantified, Mr. McEwen asks an
important question for artists in our fervent political era: How can
the horror of war be represented? Answering that question is, in
effect, to take a stand on what constitutes political art. {read on...}